Nicola Zambelli

A small town in Salento, some Soviet rock bands, CCCP and an 8-day trip between Moscow and Leningrad. The incredible story of a tour between two worlds that would never be the same again.

Gurwinder comes from Punjab, he’s been working for years as a farm hand in Agro Pontino, not far from Rome. Since he first came in Italy, he’s been living with the rest of the Sikh community in Latina province. Hardeep is also Indian, but her stress is Roman, and she works as a cultural mediator. She, born and raised in Italy, is trying to free herself from the memories of a family that emigrated in another age, while he is forced, against his faith, to take methamphetamine and doping to bear the heavy work pace, to be able to send money in India.

Shiny supermarkets stand next to dilapidated factory buildings in the Bulgarian city of Pernik, one of the Balkans once most important industrial areas. The film tells stories of intense historical transformations and economic crises, through the experiences of people who lived through an industrial rise and an industrial decline.

Ameer is just 12, but he's already an adult. Every afternoon, after school, he grazes his family's flock of sheep. Ameer has a dream, passed on for generations: to see his land and his people free from the Israeli military occupation. This is not a movie. This is Ameer's everyday life. Welcome to At-Tuwani, a little Palestinian village between the arid hills south-east from Hebron, in the so-called West Bank's C Area. Under constant menace of evacuation since 1999, the village repeatedly undergoes attacks from Israeli soldiers who live in the near settlement of Ma'on. In response to all these injustices, ten years ago it was created the Popular Resistance Committee, as a direct expression of local peasant class.

In the northern Bulgarian Balkan Mountains, a group of elderly women is waiting for the rain. The rain will come in the form of a young girl dressed in white. They will take care of her, as one cares for the youth of the past, until the awakening of the world. A visual poem to ward off winter.

At the age of eighteen, Goran arrives in Italy from Macedonia. In no time he wins the trust of many Barolo wine producers and begins providing them with labour. The Macedonian labourers call him “the Cowboy”. Today he lives in Govone where he rents and shares a modest farmhouse with his girlfriend Antoaneta. He is worried because everything is starting to go wrong after years of doing well, maybe it’s becoming a little too much for a Macedonian living in Italy. When there seems to be no way out, he decides to embark on a journey backwards, towards east, towards home. But Macedonia also seems to reject him.